


Portrait of the Artist as an Aspiring Professional (Photograph, B&W, One-point perspective)

by vibishan



Category: Scrotal Recall (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 19:50:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5468825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vibishan/pseuds/vibishan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Evie has always wanted to be an artist. She wants to look at the world like a press crushing out olive oil with the weight of her gaze; she wants to find what's real and true and lovely and show other people to see it too. When she meets Jane, there are things Evie sees, and things she wants, and things she does not see.</p><p>or</p><p>Dylan is a symptom, not the disease.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Portrait of the Artist as an Aspiring Professional (Photograph, B&W, One-point perspective)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jedi_penguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedi_penguin/gifts).



Evie remembers the moment she realizes she wants to be an artist: she’s four - almost five - and there’s a Great Storm. (Everyone calls it that, so you can hear the letters, even though she hasn’t really learned capitals yet.) It rains like the sky is turning inside out, and maybe it looks like the sea because it always had this inside of it. It rains so loud she loses the noise of London in the howling and the battering, noise she never even noticed before, as familiar as her own breathing. She dozes in an armchair big enough for her to curl up in, far from the rattling windows and the wrenching, flying trees like something out of the beginning of _The Wizard of Oz_ , and she thinks she and her father might be the only people left not washed out to sea. It rains so long she daydreams about collecting animals, like Noah. She wonders how to catch birds. (It’s only a few days, really, but she doesn’t know how to count to forty yet.) The power has been shut off for a while when the rain finally stops.

Her father falls asleep, finally, in the eerie silence after days of cramped fretting, although it was hard to tell, sometimes, if it was night or day under all the water. She sneaks past him, climbs up to the roof, blanket still clutched around her shoulders. The city is different: dark and still, like a shop after closing. Up above the sky is filled with more stars than she’d ever imagined, sparkling like the storm had scrubbed all the clouds away.

She’s never known how _big_ the world is, but suddenly she does, or she understands without knowing, feels it without being able to contain it. She _sees_. If you see something, all the way clear, at the right moment, the whole world can change.

*

The internship is shitty, one more advert gig full of small-time cheesy-glossy shoots of some totally contrived juxtapositions, products and puns, sultry models and overwrought kerning, for one more middle-tier media consultancy - but being an artist in real life means doing the shitty gigs, out of school, as many as you can, building up yourself and your skill and your name, no matter how unglamorous or uninspired that sounds. Following your dreams means wearing out your iron shoes walking hard roads in circles, it means proving yourself again and again just to keep afloat and praying for one real shot. Artwork is _work_ that you have to be doing long before anyone cares to look.

The internship where she meets Luke is not the first or the shittiest. It is _unexceptionally_ shitty, but she does get Luke out of it, unasked for and utterly unexpected. She falls in bright burnished-brass like with him immediately, no matter how many times she threatens to kill him, a surge of undeniable friendship that comes on stronger and faster than a crush ever has, because Luke is an artist too, even though he will never, ever realize it. 

Despite how often he lies to girls, he has an unquenchable talent for transmuting appalling honesty into something delightful, because he is shallow and crass but unashamedly sincere about it. He’s like piping hot chips fresh out of the oil: disgusting after the fact, if you let them go cold, if you think too long about it, but in the moment so easy to relish. He makes people see things in different ways than they planned to, which is why he does so well at his company. He makes her smile all the time, with all her teeth - because he has all the depth of a puddle in a pothole, because he is made of mud even when he’s reflecting the street, the wide sky - sometimes just by being ridiculous, but on the rare occasion he can be worked up to _performance_ , well. She would have said, once, that it was impossible to do a one-man rendition of _Homicide: Life on the Street_ , but she knows better now.

Three months after that internship she needs a new place, and she certainly isn’t moving in with _Angus_ , so she trusts what she sees in him, his self-assured brashness, his constitutional failure to hold grudges, the way she learns let herself be guiltlessly and bloodlessly sharp around him, the ease of it, the lightness of honesty between her shoulders instead of cradled in her hands, caged in plastic and film. 

She meets Luke through the job, and through Luke’s flat she meets Dylan -

(No. She’s spent too long looking at that.)

*

Evie meets Jane when she’s starting to move seriously from photography to illustration. She’s good with camera work, but she kept bumping up against the limits and temptations of it, the enforced proximity. Everything had to be right in front of her, had to already be in her life for her to capture it. While she waiting on opportunities, she feels like she was walking in her own footprints, a rut worn in ugly city snow, slippery and full of detritus. There’s more control, with drawing or painting, the power to create the angle she wants rather than constantly searching it out. And her camera had gotten unbearingly incriminating - 

(No.)

When Evie meets Jane, she is doing exactly what she planned to, when she decided to switch: making art of _other_ people, art that isn’t all really about _her_ , and where her shutter is always pointed, an admission in negative space of where she is always standing, always looking. Love isn’t art; she can’t create it from a single viewpoint. And art isn’t love, is too cruel in its prying and too certain in its reporting. She has to disentangle her dreams, has to extricate what she wants to create as a professional from what she wants to have as - not. So she tries to shed the safely blanket of the lens in between them, puts her hands directly to paper, picks up a dozen new projects along the way, honing her skills.

*

She takes a life drawing class, and Jane is one of the models. The first thing Evie thinks about Jane, before she hears a word out of her mouth, is: here is a girl who makes no apologies. She looks _bored_ , sitting on her stool, ankle propped onto her opposite knee, so that her legs are crossed without actually bothering to hide her trim blonde pubic hair, both forearms braced on the horizontal line of her lower leg, her half-teacup breasts resting in smart little curves slung under the careless curl of her chest, echoing the lazy slump of her shoulders, neither hidden nor displayed. Her mouth is a flat line, and her bluntly made-up eyes drag somewhere out the window.

Everyone is bored when they sit for anatomy modeling. It’s a boring thing to do. But most models pretend not to be, try to look focused or serene, like they’ve been caught in a single moment of contemplation. Jane looks like she’s sitting here for half an hour, much too long to worry about being poised or prim or prudish or pretty, even in the first five minutes. The truth is in the pose all along.

*

“Hey, do you want to get drinks?” Evie asks in the loo after class, while Evie is washing graphite smudges off her fingers, and Jane is putting her flat matte pink lipstick back on.

“Not a lesbian,” Jane says, without looking away from the mirror.

“Oh - no, I mean, me neither. I just wanted to get to know you a bit.”

“You don’t have to lie about it,” Jane tells her briskly. “Lots of art girls are, and you waited until I had my clothes back on, which is better than half the boys manage.”

“I’m not lying!” Evie squeaks, just a little. She hates when she’s flustered enough to squeak. “I just - I like to get to know people I’m drawing. It helps me - capture something real.”

“It’s an anatomy class, not a seance,” Jane says, tucking her lipstick into her bag, turning to look at Evie for the first time, her face incredulous and unimpressed, more confusion than disdain. “You’re supposed to be drawing my hands in proportion and my spine and my ankle bones, or whatever. It’s not about capturing the human soul.”

“That’s the whole _point_ of art. To look at the world and show people something really true. Anatomy included.”

“That’s shite, though,” Jane says, careless dismissal, hair swishing over one shoulder as she shrugs it for half a second. “People don’t look like who they really are. Life’s not the movies.”

“It’s not that simple,” Evie insists, annoyed, resisting the urge to cross her arms, hating that she has to look up, a little, to meet Jane’s eyes. It doesn’t bother her with most people, most of the time, but in that moment -

“Really, you’re going to draw my split ends and my nose scrunch and my one chipped nail so perfectly that everyone _understands_ me? Doubt it.” 

Evie bites back something defensive and absurd; asks instead - “If you think it’s shite, why do you even do this?”

“It’s a job,” she says, doesn’t shrug this time, all straightforward. “I wanted to try it.”

The worst thing - the most frustrating thing is that under her annoyance, she’s even more curious than she was before. Jane makes _I wanted to try it_ a complete sentence, a perfect standalone. No apologies, no explanations either. Evie sighs, holds up her hands, fake surrender.

“Forget art. Seriously, you should come for drinks. My friends and I go to the pub round the corner on Fridays, it does great fish and chips. And I’m paying.” Evie tries to make _I’m paying_ a full thought, in the same way, irrefutable in its simplicity. She thinks maybe she talked too long to really it off, but it works anyway.

“Fine,” Jane says, after a beat, and it ought to be curt, but it isn’t really. She means what she says. “See you then.” And she strides out.

*

Jane is good for pub nights; Evie can’t figure out if this is a redeeming quality or just adding insult to injury. She thinks the answer has more to do with her than with Jane, and she knows which one she _wants_ it to be, but -

Jane is good for pub nights because she has lots of stories. She lived in Australia for a year, escaping diving magpies and corralling spiders as big as your face. She’s done ecstasy at a concert. She’s been a lifeguard three different summers on three different beaches, and has seen some truly spectacular drunken man versus ocean disasters, and one man who could not pry a starfish off his very bare asscheek, and ended up with a sunburn around it. She worked for a shop once that sold crystals and herbs and all kinds of neo-druid flotsam, and even though it was all sparkle and snake oil, she memorised some grocery list Latin and learned to roll her eyes all the way back in her head to put ‘curses’ on skeptics who wandered in just to be rude to her about it.

“We _had_ a great fuck-off kabbalah decal on the window,” Jane points out, between swigs of beer after being called upon to demonstrate. “It’s not like they didn’t know what they were walking into.”

 _Why bother_ , Evie hears in her own voice, bleeding into Jane’s. _If you think it’s shite_.

*

“Haven’t you ever wanted to stick with something?” Evie asks. She tries to sound neutral. She’s not sure if it would be pity or jealousy that came out if she didn’t manage it.

“Not really,” Jane says. 

“But - I mean, you can’t do this forever, surely? All - animal shelters with escaping chickens and driving ice cream trucks. It’s -”

 _Childish_ , she thinks, but that’s not quite the right word, and definitely the wrong one.

“Done it so far,” Jane says with a shrug. “I like not being afraid to quit whenever I want. The next best thing to being my own boss, you know? You’re what, twenty-five, you’ve already put so much work into art that you’re basically stuck with it.”

“I’m not _stuck_ , I am - very happy to be doing this!” Evie protests. That squeak again.

“Sure,” Jane says, pushes out of her seat to go fetch more drinks.

*

By the time Evie has entirely given up not resenting Jane’s - everything, her disdain for Evie’s _entire life’s work_ and her feckless, selfish lifestyle and her stupid bleached hair, she’s already bonded with Luke over being judgemental at the World Surfing Championships, accrued a ‘usual’ at their pub even though she only comes to about every third pub night, out of petulant independance or principle or actual conflicting priorities, Evie doesn’t know. And she -

(No.)

Slept with -

(No.)

Slept with Dylan twice, because she goes for what she wants, and even if Evie mostly prefers to be the one looking instead of looked-at, to reach for the truth she needs to be honest with herself, first. So she’s jealous, but Dylan is a symptom, she thinks, not the disease. Jane _just goes for what she wants_. And Evie hates the way that for Jane, apparently that can mean _everything_ , anything, whatever catches her eye, and that she doesn’t have to work for any of it, or that she doesn’t care enough to. At least not the way Evie works, her hair stinking of silver halide, cramped hands, soulless commissions to do a royal-style portrait for some rich old fart's pomeranian. 

Jane is still a _little_ bit sentimental, is the thing - she wears that bubblegum pink lipstick every day even though it’s a lousy washed-out color for her, because it’s the color of princesses in every little-girl-daydream. Even her the jobs she takes as placeholders for the money and the time manage to accrue some whiff of the adventurous: a stakeout to catch overly intelligent chickens who are escaping an animal shelter by climbing on top of the goats, meeting a dozen doughty grandmothers dressed in Wonder Woman outfits while selling dictionaries door-to-door or delivering curries. (Evie forgets which it was.) Modeling, of course, has a bit of inherent bohemian charm even though it’s literally just sitting. Jane takes what she wants, even though she’s too cynical to admit that sincerity and sacrifice can be part of things worth wanting. Evie might not be able to draw it, yet, but she can see that much, and the hypocrisy makes her want to raise her hackles and bare her teeth like a feral dog.

(She does not wonder how someone who is drawn to all those things might end up as pessimistic as Jane, as matter-of-factly misanthropic, as adamant about maintaining her own time and space and reporting to no one. Evie's drawings of the other models are always better, in the end.)

There’s a freedom in pettiness: she can admit to being jealous, at least to herself. Jane goes for what she wants and makes no apologies, and Evie - well. What’s stopping her? And unlike Jane, she knows how to commit to something, when she goes after it, how to work, how to wait. So she sketches out the jab of Jane’s elbows and the line of her flat bum, and snipes at her during drinks, and starts practicing what she wants to say.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Holidays! I actually watched Scrotal Recall because I was stuck on my other prompt, and I'm so delighted that I did. I love trying to excavate women from dude-centric storylines, so this was an absolute treat to do, and I hope you like it. Originally I wanted to have no Dylan in it at all, but as I got to the end that started to feel dishonest, but I think it still shakes out pretty Bechdel-acceptable.
> 
> Also, there is a reference early on to _Floracita and the Iron Shoes_ , which is a really excellent feminist fairy tale/picture book, if you are into that sort of thing, about a stubborn hispanic princess rescuing her prince with the help of some witches.
> 
> The storm mentioned in the beginning is roughly based on the [Great Storm of 1987](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Storm_of_1987).


End file.
